Politics

‘The Weekly’ Profiles The PR Firm Behind ‘ScoMo’, A Doomed Attempt To Make Our PM Likeable

"I mean, stick him in a cap, send him out to do some dickhead shit," is the main thrust of the campaign, according to the firm.

by Joseph Earp  16 May 2019
The Weekly work on rebranding Scott Morrison

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Ever since he knifed his best mate in the back, Scott Morrison has faced a singular challenge: convincing the voting public that he is a nice, likeable bloke, rather than a power-obsessed and distinctly craven politician who has to take time out of his day to clarify that he doesn’t think some Australians should roast in hell for all eternity.

To that end, it was always going to take a particularly skilled PR firm to make Scott “I Stopped These” Morrison come across like a human and not a robot that spits out Bible phrases, political jargon and deeply isolationist and xenophobic rhetoric.

But, according to The Weekly, the very real, definitely not satirical PR firm that are behind Morrison’s rebrand are finally ready to talk about the hard work they’ve poured into our PM.

Hill-Douglas, the firm handed the daunting task of making Morrison human, began their work in 2018 with a frank assessment of Morrison’s chances.

“This one was tough,” Andrew Walker, Brand Designer of Hill-Douglas, explains. “I mean, here is a bloke who worshipped a lump of coal in parliament. He was an asshole to refugees. He abstained from voting on marriage equality. And then he votes against a Royal Commission into banking 26 times.”

“I mean he had his arm around the old Prime Minister while his backroom men were doing the numbers,” Jeremy Payne, Hill-Douglas’ publicist, adds.

From there, the two men hit upon a novel strategy — calling the PM “ScoMo”, giving him a particularly vapid catchphrase (“If you have a go in this country, you’ll get a go”), a tendency to ask questions that he has no intention of answering, and speaking in a brand new tense for the English language.

“I mean, stick him in a cap, send him out to do some dickhead shit,” Payne says, neatly summing up the strategy.

We’ll see if it works out for ScoMo this Saturday when Aussies go to the polls.